Today’s Sociotechnical Problems Require a New Field of Study

The challenges of running the transportation system in Mexico City present more than just an engineering problem. With a population of 22.9 million people, according to the latest count, it ranks as the largest metropolitan area in the Western hemisphere and the seventh largest in the world. It’s the combination of complex engineering factors, combined with equally difficult human considerations, that makes such problems, known as complex sociotechnical systems (CSS), so frustratingly difficult to address.

That is why some authorities, such as MIT professor Joseph Sussman, argue that these systems should be the subject of a new field of academic study. Sussman made his case in a lecture just several weeks ago.

A quick look at the difficulties facing transportation planners in Mexico City is enough to convince one that Sussman has a good case. Solving this problem–as well as other sociotechnical problems such as healthcare, the financial markets, climate change, job growth, the economy and national security–requires a new way of looking at systems, one that takes the unpredictable nature of human behavior into account. And since these systems have major societal, political and economic implications, it is important that we learn how to manage them.

Mexico City has major transportation problems, which have serious productivity and economic consequences. At the same time, the city has severe environmental issues which affect the health of its residents. There are also social equity issues surrounding the transportation costs, which are a burden to many of the city’s residents. You cannot formulate a reasonable transportation strategy for Mexico City, or any other metropolitan area, without taking into account all these various issues.

Furthermore, the various components of a CSS often operate at very different time scales. For example, lowering the costs of public transportation addresses the social equity issues, but could result in serious overcrowding. The solution is to build additional subway and light rail lines, but that is expensive and takes a long time. A nearer term solution to overcrowding is to increase the number of buses, but that could negatively impact the environmental issues, unless the buses are electric, which then requires a new support infrastructure.

In addition, the multiple stakeholders of a complex sociotechnical systems often have disparate interests and thus quite different goals and objectives, as well as different ways of evaluating system performance. Sussman calls this evaluative complexity. For example, adding a runway to a crowded airport will reduce delays and potentially increase the number of flights to the city. While this will benefit most city residents, those living near the airport will be subject to additional noise as a result of the extra flights. Trying to satisfy the various stakeholders adds another set of difficulties to those already faced by the system designers and operators.

As we can see, we have much to learn on how to best design and operate complex sociotechnical systems. They generally exhibit a level of complexity that is often beyond our ability to understand and control.

The first step in addressing these systems is to acknowledge that there is no such thing as an optimal CSS design. Instead, one must generate a set of good-enough, strategic alternatives, carefully evaluate their feasibility, and then select the one that best satisfies the various requirements and stakeholders. We must approach the design from a pragmatic point of view based on satisfying–not optimizing.

When dealing with CSS designs, we have much to learn from biological systems. As in biology, the key attributes of a good CSS design are robustness and flexibility. The system must be robust enough to perform adequately under lots of different conditions, including failures of individual components, unanticipated interactions and external events, and a wide range of human decision making styles and choices. And, the system must be flexible enough to quickly adapt to a fast changing environment.

But, in both evolution and human designs, robustness and flexibility come at a price. The sophisticated control mechanisms needed to increase robustness and flexibility, will in turn make the system considerably more complex and add their own unanticipated failure modes. These will then be corrected over time with additional robust mechanisms, which then further add to the complexity of the system, and so on. This balancing act between complexity and robustness is never done.

For example, one of the most important protection mechanisms in biology is the immune system, which guards against disease. But the immune system is subject to its own serious diseases, such as immunodeficiencies when its activity is abnormally slow, and autoimmunities, which are caused by a hyperactive immune system.

Similarly what we often referred to as the ilities in a well designed IT system–reliability, serviceability, availability, scalability, usability, security, disaster recovery and so on–add significantly to the size and complexity of the system, and often leads to new kinds of design bugs.

As we continue to apply our increasingly powerful technologies to a wider range of critical problems, we will design ever more sophisticated and complex sociotechnical systems. To help us do so, we need the appropriate research and education programs.

But, in my opinion, the most powerful case for a new field of study lies in Professor Sussman’s admonition that dealing with complex sociotechnical systems requires humility on our part. We must be aware of the considerable difficulties in predicting system behavior and in making decisions that affect that behavior. And, we must keep in mind this quote from Laurence Peter, of Peter Principle fame: “Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.” But at the same time, we now have the technologies, tools, engineering methodologies and scientific principles to be able to better design and manage such systems.

This new field is multidisciplinary in nature, and should enable us to address a particular domain–e.g., transportation, energy, finance–by bringing together a number of different methodologies. These include: systems-oriented techniques, like optimization, stochastic systems, systems simulation and systems dynamics; social sciences, management and planning, including economics, sociology, organizational behavior and strategy; and deep quantitative engineering science, which brings all the methodologies together and focuses on design, development, testing and operations.

In his lecture, Professor Sussman says that it is not enough for us to study complex sociotechnical systems. We are not just passive observers. We are actually developing such systems in a variety of domains, so it is important that this new field of study should also be prescriptive in nature. In the end, the success of this new discipline will depend on whether it will help us design better performing systems and manage them more effectively.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger is a former vice-president of technical strategy and innovation at IBM. He is a strategic advisor to Citigroup and is a regular contributor to CIO Journal.

Comments (5 of 7)

DISAGREE - I agree
And as far as the civil engineering side of it goes - most people wouldn't shop around for the lowest priced heart surgery they can find, but would think it okay to bid shop for engineering services. If a heart surgeon makes a mistake, someone could die. If a civil engineer makes a mistake, hundres (building collapse) or even thousands (dam failure) could die.

10:08 am May 24, 2012

Disagree wrote:

As we continue to hear the drumbeat that government is the root of all evil, and we continue to follow the Walmart model of cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, regardless of quality and function; there first needs to be a huge shift in public opinion. Flexibility and robustness mean increased costs which the current media enviornment reports as waste and overspending.

8:13 am May 24, 2012

Tabish, India wrote:

As we are progressing and dealing with big projects, issues mostly involved are of multidisciplinary trade. But I think instead of searching for new field of study, we require better coordination and an appraoch which recognizes the contribution of each and every trade involved. It is the overlapping area which needs to be better controlled and given attention.

6:28 pm May 23, 2012

PWCE wrote:

complex sociotechnical systems (CSS) = Public Works-Civil Engineering. This is what all Public Works engineers go through on every project at some level to deliver a project for the community. It is one of the oldest fields of "practice" (maybe not academic study) in civil engineering.

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